Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Tablets on the rise as laptops fall

The
San Jose Mercury news is reporting that IDC (Intl. Data Corp) predicts 2013
will bring more bad news for the PC. The
de facto barometer of consumer markets has revised its latest estimate for
yearly PC sales downward. What was
expected to be a 1.3% decline has now been projected to be more like 7.8%.

The blame is placed squarely on an increase in tablet
sales. With 229.3 million expected this
year IDC has gone so far as to predict tablet sales to outpace the entirety of
the PC market by 2015.

Unfortunately, the news is both obvious and misplaced.

Comparing sales of the Galaxy Note to a laptop is akin to
comparing a fine wine to a 44 ounce fountain drink.

Tablets are consumer devices more on par with their
Smartphone cousins than any laptop. In
a market sense they are disposable. Conversely,
laptops and the PC market in general operate on a much longer replacement cycle. It's not uncommon, for example, for the average tech savvy consumer to
purchase 2 tablets during the lifespan of one laptop.

These days nobody would seriously consider paying upwards of
$1000 for a laptop just to browse the web and check their email when a $300
tablet will do. It's a given that such
mundane mobility tasks have been ceded to the smart device market.

As such, the decline of PC market share is to be expected
but isn't quite the death knell the tech punditry keeps drumming on about. Rather it's a realignment of markets defined
by their functionality instead of their volume and that's as it should be.

A Surface Pro is not a competitor to any IPAD even though
both claim a tablet form factor. Their
purposes are distinct and so are their customers.

In a sense, the cheap, underpowered laptop of yesterday is the
progenitor of today's tablet which now occupies it's place in the market. A classic case of technological evolution and
natural selection if ever there was one.